demonizing autistics

my last post was about a very strange woman who has autism. today, i bring you a different case of autism, one far more sinister. the son of salon.com regular contributor ann bauer has autism, and while she has written several articles about other subjects, about half of her articles for salon.com have been about her autistic son, whose name is andrew. her latest article is where to start, describing how he has turned into a violent “monster”. it is the fifth article about her autistic son andrew. here are the previous articles (read them after the fifth one if you are actually interested, but the fifth-one is the only must-read out of them all): first, second, third, and fourth. now i found her latest article to be incredibly shocking and disturbing, as i have asperger’s syndrome myself, and asperger’s syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder and is often thought to be the same as high-functioning autism. she even says that her son has high-functioning autism. then i started reading all of the many, many responses to her latest post, and some of them made me feel even more upset. ann bauer is blaming her son’s autism for him being violent, but plenty of men (and women too) who do not have any autism whatsoever are also violent. most people with autism spectrum disorders, such as me for instance, are not violent. while her latest article is quite personal and i am sure accurate (ann bauer even admits that she has been stockpiling lots of sleeping pills and planning on committing suicide if her son ever kills anyone), i think that it sends a dangerous and misleading message about autism spectrum disorders (which are sometimes also called pervasive developmental disorders, a less explanatory name). the most dangerous form of mental illness is, in case you didn’t know, antisocial personality disorder. anyone who has antisocial personality disorder is pretty much guaranteed to be a criminal, and very likely a violent one, since people with it have no morals, do not care about anyone except themselves, refuse to follow any authority or rules, and are impulsive, often in violent ways. as for my asperger’s syndrome, i think my case of asperger’s is quite mild, and mostly it is just social anxiety disorder (that later worsened into panic disorder when i started having panic attacks in college), combined with avoidant personality disorder. i am not 100% sure whether i actually have or don’t have asperger’s syndrome or avoidant personality disorder, but what i can be 100% sure of is that i have panic disorder, since i sure as hell have had some nasty panic attacks. panic attacks are caused by the “fight or flight response”, which, in the case of panic, is the flight response (wanting to escape from a scary situation). sudden violent outbursts are the other side of the “fight or flight response” coin: they are the fight response. my brain seems to be hardwired for anxiety, not fighting, when i find myself upset. so perhaps the violence of this autistic man andrew can be explained as a fight response. or maybe he is intentionally malicious. it is difficult for me to speculate about what may go on in the mind of someone with more severe autism than the incredibly mild version that i probably have. i am so much more like normal people who don’t have any form of autism whatsoever than i am like people with severe autism. still, i feel badly for them, and the ones that behave badly give the rest of us who are on the autism spectrum a bad name. i do not understand them at all, but that is a problem for all of us on the autism spectrum: we do not understand other people. the mother of andrew, ann bauer, seems to have a bit of mental illness of her own; in fact, i can say it as a factual matter that she suffers from mental illness, because she is suicidal and that is by definition mental illness. perhaps her mental illness is simply plain old depression, or depression mixed with anxiety (i have anxiety too, like i said). in any event, somebody who has no mental illness cannot be suicidal, because of the way mental illnesses are all defined and because psychologists and psychiatrists pretty much all agree that being suicidal indicates mental illness. anyway, depression and anxiety are mood disorders, and are not actual insanity. insanity, or, as it is now called in the psychological and psychiatric professions, psychosis, involves a person being disconnected from reality, and the most common type of psychosis is schizophrenia. autism spectrum disorders, personality disorders, and mood disorders are all outside the realm of insanity and psychosis. people who have them are still sane; they observe the real world, they can think logically unless they are too retarded to do so, and they are not lunatics. autism is a rather curious condition then, and it is primarily social retardation along with a few quirky eccentricities. i suppose that andrew, if he is autistic and does not have any psychosis, is most likely someone who is just frustrated with his life and the way things have turned out, who hates himself, who cannot understand other people, and is just very very upset. what people without autism spectrum disorders often fail to understand is that people who have autism spectrum disorders are mostly people that want to be social creatures just as much as everyone else, if not more so, but they find themselves unable to be social, and instead they fail utterly in this regard. throughout my lifetime so far, my experiences have been exactly that: wanting to be just as social as others, if not more so, but finding my own social abilities and my social courage to both be severely lacking, to the point where i have had very little success socially. i also understand why andrew would be upset: as a young person who his loving mother kept insisting was intelligent and had a bright future ahead of him, he most likely had set up very high expectations for himself, and when he ended up in living conditions where he no longer had any freedom, he probably became quite upset. however, i also think andrew may have antisocial personality disorder, as evidenced by his criminal activity (such as eating at restaurants and not paying, or assaulting women). he may very well have developed antisocial personality disorder “comorbid” with his autism, meaning that he has both conditions at the same time. when you read the articles by his mother (including the other articles on salon.com by her that are not about her son), it also becomes clear that she led a very chaotic life, including a rather chaotic divorce with her first husband, and then a messy series of relationships and periods of being single, ultimately resulting with a second marriage that seems to be going well so far. the mother seems quite obsessed with her autistic son and helping him out, and while it is natural for mothers to want to help and protect their offspring, it is perhaps advisable to remember that there can be too much of a good thing. while, as i mentioned earlier, we who have autism spectrum disorders often want to be social, we also often want to be left alone, just like regular people often want people who are bothering them to leave them alone. autistic people are not especially different from normal people except for things like the lack of communication skills. of course, severe cases of autism are often comorbid with mental retardation, and i think the reason for this is that the learning process, wherein one person teaches new information to somebody else, is in some ways a social interaction, and someone severely disabled socially as well as with communication may be unable to learn things from other people. in this case, such a person would need to learn everything on their own, and they may not be lucky enough to possess a keen enough intellect to figure things out without the aid of others, the end result of this being retardation. or perhaps in the severe cases, the mental retardation exists from the beginning. anyway, if you look at the comments for the article, you will run across a number of people who have worked in jobs where they had to interact with people with autism on a daily basis, and both people who dealt with autistic children as well as those who dealt with autistic adults said that some of them could be quite violent. so a great deal of people are actually coming forth with firsthand accounts of how they witnessed violence carried out by people on the autism spectrum. a lot of people talk about people with autism as if they are animals or just things, and some of them recommend castration as a solution! we are being objectified and treated as subhuman, as animals, by some of the people who commented on this article. i certainly do not have full-blown autism, but these are human beings we are talking about here! men with autism care just as much about their balls as any other men, and sure as hell don’t want a bunch of assholes castrating them. castration used to be done to the mentally ill, but luckily that horrific practice was stopped. if you take away a man’s testes, his manhood, you may as well just take away his life and kill him... and in fact some of the people commented that the most humane solution might be to euthanize people with autism. other people commented that there should be some kind of eugenics to prevent anyone with autism from being born in the first place, as if autism is some kind of horrible disease that needs to be eradicated, and not just a natural personality type that many people happen to have. it was very chilling reading people’s reactions to it, how so many people dehumanized not only andrew but everyone with autism, and how they seem so ready to deny the basic human rights that we hold so dear to people with autism spectrum disorders just because a small percentage of autistic people end up violent (probably around the same percentage of non-autistic people who end up violent). it makes me think of how the jews were discriminated against by the nazis, and i know that whenever anyone brings up hitler and the holocaust, this is supposed to indicate that they have taken the argument to an absurd level and therefore lost the argument. i am not saying this is anything like the holocaust whatsoever, just that it made me think of the holocaust, and it made me frightened for my own safety, as someone with an autism spectrum disorder. of course, no action anywhere near that bad has been taken against us on the autistic spectrum so far by angry mobs with pitchforks and torches, and if i think about it realistically, i sincerely doubt that anything like that ever would happen. but just reading what some people write about people with autism frightens me. then again, i am frightened easily, since after all, i do have panic disorder, the one disorder i can be completely sure that i have, because my numerous severe panic attacks over the last 9 years are proof beyond any reasonable doubt. it is pretty obvious that i am overreacting to this article by ann bauer about her son and the comments posted on salon.com about it. i feel badly for both her and her son, as well as everyone else who has been involved in any way (anyone her son did bad things to, for instance). in the case of her son, it is clear that andrew is a menace to society and cannot be allowed to roam free or to ever have the chance to physically attack someone who is weaker than him. i hope he can be rehabilitated somehow so that he is no longer dangerous, but otherwise, he ought to remain behind bars, in a mental institution preferably, or else in jail. being autistic is no excuse for his behavior, and even if it is a valid excuse, that does not mean society should just let andrew continue attacking people. however, he is just one person and every person is different. we should not generalize about everyone with autism just because he is a violent criminal. the virginia tech killer was asian, in fact south korean; however, we have not seen asians or south koreans demonized as a bunch of crazy killers... i mean, we actually have seen that, but it did not last very long, and it was just a few people on the internet anyway. i suppose there are groups of people that continue to have an image problem when it comes to violence. men, for instance. black people. arabs. muslims. all have been stereotyped as violent. however, if you look at the statistics, men really are more likely to be violent than women, and african-americans are more likely to be violent than european-americans (i am using that to refer to white people since, after all, we white people are of european ancestry and are not native to america like native americans; also i am hyphenating both with americans to indicate that i am only referring to people in the united states, since i am going by those statistics). i need not go into the various debates over why violent crime is more commonly carried out by african-americans than european-americans, because those debates are unrelated to the subject of this blog post, so suffice it to say that i think the primary reason is economic inequality. as for the level of violence carried out by arabs or muslims, the overall number of people killed or percentage of people who are violent or kill people is not something i know the statistics for, but certain types of violence, like major terrorist attacks, are almost exclusively done by muslims, usually muslims of arab ancestry. this does not mean that muslims are more violent, since after all, non-muslims have plenty of ways to kill people, such as using military force. anyway, that is not the main topic either, and i was just trying to point out that sometimes people with autism spectrum disorders are demonized, and that is not cool with me at all. that type of discrimination is like racism, sexism, homophobia, age discrimination, or any other type of evil bias against those who are different from you. many of history’s greatest geniuses are thought to have had asperger’s syndrome, the milder autism spectrum disorder that i have. this includes people like isaac newton and albert einstein, among the many great names. among people alive today, we have stephen spielberg, bill gates, and al gore, just to name a few. and ok, i have to mention the encyclopedia dramatica entry on asperger’s. everything on encyclopedia dramatica is meant to be as insulting, negative, and offensive as possible, regardless of who or what it is about. the first time i read that article, maybe 3 years ago or so, i was very very upset, and the article was actually quite different then but just as offensive and insulting, mainly just with less pictures and videos, and not as long. i did not quite understand the purpose of encyclopedia dramatica or what encyclopedia dramatica was all about. now that i have read a whole lot of articles on encyclopedia dramatica, and enjoyed most of them, even learning a lot from them, i know that the article at encyclopedia dramatica is all in good fun and they insult everybody, and i just need to have a sense of humor and not take it too seriously, because encyclopedia dramatica is a fake encyclopedia full of offensive humor designed to produce “lulz” such as my initial reaction to the article about asperger’s. lulz are basically laughing at someone else’s misfortune, as encyclopedia dramatica explains quite clearly. since the entire purpose of encyclopedia dramatica is lulz, it makes no sense for anyone to take anything on that site seriously, and it is good for everyone, especially those of us on the autism spectrum, to have some sense of perspective and a sense of humor, and not take things personally when they are just jokes. the article on salon.com and its responses, however, are not jokes or lulz, and are what the humorists at encyclopedia dramatica refer to as serious business. so when someone is serious about demonizing autistics and denying basic human rights to fellow human beings, when people talk about castration, euthanasia, and eugenics, and talk about people who are different from them as if they are subhuman animals, that is when i have a serious problem with them. it would be bad enough reading comments like that on some wacko conservative website, but salon.com is a haven for liberals, and it appalls me to think that my fellow liberals would have such discriminatory and intolerant attitudes towards autistics. salon.com does allow people of all political persuasions to comment, however, and it does have its fair share of libertarians, republicans, independents, and other non-democrats among people who comment, although they are very much in the minority. more than half the comments were ones expressing sympathy, which is good, and some of the comments were ongoing arguments between various commenters there who hate each other and argue all the time. there was some foolish bickering between a wacko who hates psychiatrists (but is not a scientologist) and people who actually are psychiatrists... he seemed like one of the libertarian ron paul supporters. anyway, amid all of those comments were the ones that i personally found disturbing, the ones that threatened bad things for people with autism. i would have left a comment myself, except i do not have an account at salon.com or any of these other websites where i look at the comments. it is too much of a bother to register at all these stupid websites, just to post comments. so i don’t do it. i only register at a website if i have a good reason to do so, and if there is not a way around it. so anyway, i doubt any of the people from salon.com will find my response here, but at least people who read this blog entry can find what i am responding to, since i linked to it at the beginning of the entry. i am not sure if anyone will read this or even care, but frankly that does not really matter to me anyway. i just felt like saying all this, and i don’t too much care whether this blog is a private journal that nobody reads or a really popular blog that everybody reads. my preference, if there is one, is that a few people read this blog, more than 1 or 2, but not like thousands or anything, because that would probably be too much. anyway, i think i made my point in this post and i am getting kind of lengthy and repetitious so i should quit while i’m behind. also, i need to sleep. now. good night, or whatever time it is now, wherever you are. you are probably on earth, but who cares? it would be cool if an astronaut looked at this blog from the international space station, i guess, but whatever. i am not sure whether astronauts have the internet up there, but who cares? that is just something completely irrelevant that i just brought up at the last moment because i am tired and my mind is wandering, and it has nothing to do with anything. my thought process is non-linear. in keeping with my thought process, let me briefly pretend time is going backwards, for the sake of silliness: hello and welcome to this blog post.

an interesting lifestyle choice

most people’s lifestyle choices are fairly boring. there are a few different choices people make about how to live their lives nowadays but basically most people operate in the same way as a large percentage of other people. for instance, some people graduate high school and others are dropouts. some people decide to go to college and others don’t. some college students get all the way through to a diploma and others drop out or fail out. some people party a lot and others are at home most of the time. some people have jobs and other people live off of welfare, either from the government, from charities, or family/friends. some people are sexually active and others aren’t. some people are straight and others are gay. some people are into sports, some people are into video games, some people watch a lot of television, and some people spend a lot of time on the internet. people like or dislike different kinds of foods but we generally agree on what things are considered food and what is not considered food (e.g. broccoli is food and plastic is not food). most people are fluent in at least 1 language that is spoken by their fellow humans. all in all, there are many possible combinations, but the array of choices people have for lifestyles nowadays is not terribly vast. of course, the above comparisons of lifestyle choices are typical ones you find in the united states, and in many other countries the array of choices would be very different, quite often even narrower.

however, there are a few strange individuals out there who boldly live lives so utterly bizarre, they are truly unique. one such example is a woman who calls herself faye kane. i read a comment by her at slate.com about a slate.com article i read. both the article and faye’s comment condemned republican hypocrisy, and i agree with both the article and her comment on it. but at the bottom of her comment i noticed her “signature” (something that is automatically added by people to their web postings on certain websites):

<quote>
I'm an autistic savant. I live naked in the woods because I'm disgusted with grotesquely-misnamed "humanity". I steal electricity to run my wireless internet. Yes, really. Read more of my smartmouth opinions at http://tinyurl.com/fayescave
</quote>

as someone with asperger’s (the same as autism only milder, and probably what she actually has), i know firsthand that people on the autistic spectrum (myself included) tend to be weirdos. but let’s just get a few facts about faye kane out of the way first: she is an intelligent person on the autistic spectrum, which probably means she has asperger’s syndrome instead of leo kanner’s classical type of full-blown autism. she lives in a cave in the forest (or rather, a tent covered in branches and leaves to hide it). she proudly proclaims that she is hot, that she is naked all the time, and that she spends most of the time masturbating. she mostly avoids interacting with other humans in real life, but she has managed to steal electricity from the electric company and hook up her cave with power, where she has a computer with broadband internet access. she forages for garbage in dumpsters and then sells it on ebay. basically, she is a very strange individual who is, at least as far as traditional society is concerned, an insane pervert and a criminal. however, i don’t really think there is much of anything wrong with what she is doing, and i find it fascinating that a homeless person like her would be so advanced. now, if you want to know why she ended up living such a bizarre lifestyle, read this. that is her explanation, at least. apparently she had a series of jobs where despite her superior intelligence and technical aptitude, her bosses kept getting into disagreements with her and she kept getting fired. she ended up pretty much completely disillusioned with humanity, apparently. of course, it is easy for someone on the autism spectrum to become disillusioned with the rest of humanity, and it comes quite naturally to us. but usually we do not resort to such strange and fascinating lifestyle choices. there are those who think that asperger’s is just a way to classify intelligence as a disease. some companies actually go out of their way to hire people with asperger’s in the belief that people with asperger’s are smart, hard working, and the perfect kind of people to hire, despite the lack of social skills and inability of people with asperger’s to “sell themselves” at job interviews. and of course, here is a postmodern feminist critique of asperger’s symdrome, which is rather interesting. anyway, if you doubt whether faye kane really lives like she claims to, this is her rebuttal to all the doubters. personally i believe her story to be true, in part because people with autism or asperger’s generally do not lie, but more importantly because this story is too weird to be made up, there is photographic evidence, there are other people online who have actually been to her cave, her story does not violate science or logic, her story is just so awesome i want it to be true even if it is totally made up, and i do not care whether it actually is true or not since it does not impact me in the slightest. so anyway... if you thought i was strange, there are MUCH weirder people out there. and i find them interesting. don’t worry though, readers... i do not want to be like the ultra-weird... i am trying to “cure” myself of negative aspects of asperger’s to become more normal. but when it comes to stuff like faye kane, i just want MOAR LULZ!!!

update: i just found out she is a subgenius after looking through her newer blog entries. the subgenius advertisement she includes in that post has only had 36,390 views according to youtube, so the odds of a random person on the internet being one of the people who actually saw that subgenius video are incredibly low. however, rev. stang has described the church of the subgenius as “kook flypaper”, and it does seem to attract the weirdest elements of humanity. ok, so i have no evidence that she has actually joined the church of the subgenius, but clearly she has found out about us, and in a more recent post she derisively spake of the “normals”, so she is already adopting subgenius terminology. i doubt she would join the church of the subgenius, since she has been living homeless and unemployed in a secret forest hideout for years now, so she would have a hard time coming up with the $30 one-time-only membership fee, and would have no mailing address for her super-awesome membership packet to be sent to. so, she is one of the many non-subgenius subgenii, people who know about the church of the subgenius and agree with it but have not sent in the membership fee to become ordained subgenius reverends. i do not really consider this to be much of a coincidence, despite the seemingly low probability, because “bob” is everywhere, and the weirder someone is, the more likely they are to find out about him and become a follower of his. in her case, it is especially likely, since she is alone all the time in her “cave” in the forest and has a computer with broadband internet, and she has the same deviant tendencies as most other subgenii. i must point out, however, that there are many famous people who are members of the church of the subgenius, such as the actor who played pee wee herman, the actor who played dolemite, all the members of the band sublime, penn jillette from penn & teller, the lead singer of 80s band devo, george clinton (of parliament funkadelic fame), and timothy leary, for starters, and here is wikipedia’s list. for some reason wikipedia only has a list of american subgenii and a list of british subgenii, and the 2 british ones are people i never heard of, so i just linked to the american list since it is much much longer. anyway, this odd coincidence is not so odd when you remember 2 important facts: 1) people on the autism spectrum are weirdos. 2) subgenii are weirdos. so, the set of people who are weirdos has two subsets of its own, people on the autistic spectrum and subgenii, and those two subsets intersect each other, as i could easily depict in a venn diagram if i felt like it. i happen to belong to the intersection of those 2 subsets, and apparently this faye kane lady is also in that intersection. luckily though, i have a place to live and a job, and i have absolutely no intention of ending up like her, with neither. some argue that high-functioning autism is the exact same thing as asperger’s, and i agree completely. therefore, given the fact that she is intelligent and on the autistic spectrum, she has aspeger’s. unfortunately, this disproves the popular theory that only males have aspeger’s, a theory held by many people, including me, because i have only met guys who have asperger’s, and never encountered a female with it. another counterexample to the only-guys-have-asperger’s theory is temple grandin, inventor of the hugbox. however, george orwell developed a new type of logic in 1984. war is peace! freedom is slavery! ignorance is power! under orwellian logic, because females with asperger’s exist, females with asperger’s do not exist. therefore, i have disproven the existence of faye kane. q.e.d. signed, brilliant mathematician

fluffems (???? - 2009)

well, my (and my parents’) dog fluffems was killed today, february 28, 2009, around 12:15 pm, run over by a pickup truck on upper front street. my parents were trying to catch him, my dad chasing him and my mom in a car. my mom had also placed a trail of pieces of cheese leading to the front door and another one on the back porch to lead him to the back door. he had been loose for over an hour, in weather of about 25 degrees fahrenheit, and his fur was rather thin, yet i doubt he got cold at all since he was running too fast for anyone to keep up with. i was actually asleep at the time. maybe i could have saved him this time, but he would have eventually gotten run over. he was not afraid of anything, not lightning, fireworks, sewer grates, or cars; our previous dog mokka was afraid of all those things. whenever he ran away he liked to go towards front street and if he got there he would sometimes cross it multiple times, and it is a huge road full of cars. of course we tried to stop him every time he tried to go in that direction, but he was faster than any of us and didn’t want to be caught. to him, running away and having people chase him was a game. he was the nicest, friendliest, most loving, most harmless, most energetic, most spirited, and most vicious beast i have ever encountered. as far as i know, the only commands we ever managed to teach him were “sit” and “lie down”, and he never came when called. he understood it when someone called him, but he thought of it as a friendly invitation that was completely optional, not as a command that he had to follow. i loved fluffems more than anything, just as i loved my previous dog mokka more than anything. i do not really know what to make of this. i suppose i should just move on with my life or something. fluffems was adopted from the local dog pound after his previous owner abandoned him, leaving him in a crate by the side of the road in downtown binghamton. he always hated being inside crates or cages. i remember last night i had an argument with my mom about whether to lock him in a crate all night like she wanted, or let him roam around free downstairs like i wanted. i always wanted fluffems to be happy, since he was my best friend in the world. i think we got him from the dog pound in april 2007, so we had him less than 2 years. he was estimated as being about a year old when we got him, or maybe it was a year and a half. i don’t know. from the time we got him to when he was killed, he did not grow at all but his weight went up from 12 to 13 pounds. he was either a west highland terrier or some kind of mutt, but we have no idea since there are no pedigree documents. fluffems is what we named him after we got him; he must have had a different name before. he was neutered at the dog pound before we bought him, but there is a minor chance that he actually fathered some puppies before his original owner abandoned him. i doubt it though, since he was pretty much still a puppy himself. so his year of birth was probably 2006 if the estimates of the people at the dog pound are correct, but who knows? he certainly never got old at all. all my clothes are still covered in dog hair since he shed fur all the time, and the couch in the living room is completely covered. he tore so many dog toys to pieces using his fangs and powerful jaws. he even bit me a few times, but never very hard. he liked to cuddle, and liked sleeping next to a person instead of all alone. we took him with us on a trip to florida from late december to early january. he did not enjoy the plane rides or airports, but everyone who saw him loved him and said what a nice cute dog he was. he had a very good time in florida, and we even took him to the beach, despite the hefty fine we would have had to pay if we were caught with a dog in that no-dogs-allowed zone. he did not like cold weather, but enjoyed the summers a great deal, which makes sense given that he had white fur that reflects light instead of absorbing it, and that he had rather little fur. if you got him wet you could see right through the fur, and underneath his skin was half splotches of pink and half splotches of black. he would also smell bad if you got him wet. he did not enjoy baths, so he had very few of those, and he never needed a haircut. my mom trimmed all his claws a few days ago, which she did on a regular basis, and he was quite cooperative and uncomplaining. one thing he liked to do was look out the window and wait for someone to come by, and then start barking at them viciously. he never killed anything though. i remember he was actually afraid of little frogs and little lizards when i showed them to him (after i caught them with my bare hands). so then i would set the little wild animals free. those tiny creatures were the only things he was afraid of... besides baths and the veterinarian. he was very dominant with other dogs and always wanted to be boss, and he was certainly trying to be quite dominant here in our household. i wish i had been able to save him today, but it is too late for that. he was going to get run over by a vehicle on front street someday anyway, since he had tried to do that before a number of times. he thought it was all a big fun game and did not realize he was in any danger. luckily my dad is the only member of our family to see him get killed or to see him dead, and he is going to be cremated at the veterinarian. this is a very sad day, but also a joyous day because fluffems was always so full of joy, and just thinking about that wonderful dog fills me with joy, even if he is no longer with us. i can scarcely imagine him being anything other than just the happiest creature on the planet, since that was what he was like almost all the time. in fact, i bet in the last few minutes and even seconds of his life, he was happier than ever, since he had absolutely no idea he was in any danger, and was fully enjoying the “game” of playing in traffic. the pickup truck killed him pretty much instantly. so unlike my previous dog mokka, who was dying over the course of months and had a very miserable final day of her life full of screaming out in pain and agony for hours on end, fluffems died very happily, completely oblivious to any danger, enjoying things thoroughly. back in january he did have an ear infection for awhile, and i had him taken to the vet and treated until it was cured, but it did not really slow him down too much or prevent him from having fun. the last time i saw him was last night, after i finally agreed to lock him in his cage, and went down to find he was already in there, asleep. i closed the cage door on him and locked it, secure in the knowledge that i would be able to play with him and we would have fun together the next day. if i had had any doubts about that, i would have played with the dog all night. i still cannot believe he is gone. i gave him the name fluffems, a silly name, since he was a silly animal. i was always very nice to him, and perhaps he was my master, since he managed to get me to always argue for him to have more freedom and not be caged (his last owner abandoned him by the side of the road in a cage, and he was stuck in there for many hours, and he never liked cages one bit), and i generally gave the dog whatever he wanted. how could i resist doing that though? fluffems gave me way more positive attention than anyone else, even my previous dog mokka, who sometimes ignored me or tried to avoid me in her later years, and was not as affectionate or outgoing as him. i think today i should just look back at what a wonderful creature fluffems had and what a wonderful life he had. his life may have been short when it comes to time, but it was full of fun times and enjoyment. i remember when i heard the obamas needed a dog, i thought fluffems would be the perfect dog for them or for anyone else, and that if they really wanted him, than despite how much i love my little doggie, i would let them have fluffems, since they could probably provide a better life for him than me. then, awhile later, i realized i liked fluffems more than the obamas or anyone else, and fluffems liked me more than any other person or animal, and the obamas could probably find a dog more suited to their hypo-allergenic and other silly demands. but i doubt they could ever find a dog as great as fluffems. sure, his fatal flaw of not knowing of the existence of danger may have been a problem, but nobody is perfect, and dogs are generally not that smart. he was quite smart about many other things, just not knowing about danger. quite smart for a dog, not for a person. he, like mokka, was a master of escape. the only difference is, mokka eventually came back, mokka did not run too fast to be caught, mokka was much more obedient and knew more than 10 times as many commands, and mokka was afraid of many dangerous things. i am sure fluffems’ lack of knowledge in commands was chiefly the result of his independent spirit and refusal to obey any master other than himself, not of any lack in intelligence or hearing abilities. i suppose another thing mokka was better at than fluffems was catching things. if you threw something at mokka’s head, she would catch it in her mouth. if you threw something at fluffems’s head, it would hit him in the head, bounce off, land on the floor, and then get sniffed by him. and fluffems was much less thorough at licking up food spilled on the floor than mokka. mokka was more lethargic and more willing to concentrate on one thing for a period of time than the short-attention-span hyperactive maniac fluffems. fluffems was almost untrainable, but perhaps our family was just not that good at training him. i don’t think he wanted to be trained though, since he would never cooperate. my parents took a course with fluffems on how to train a dog, and i expected them to actually do what was taught in the course, but for some reason they wanted me to train him instead, even though i had no idea how to train a dog and they were the ones who took the course. so he did not get trained much by anyone. he even peed and pooped inside on a regular basis. he did it just last night, less than 24 hours before he died... and he was in perfect health. i don’t know if anyone could have trained a beast like fluffems... probably an expert could have, but it would cost too much to pay some expert to train our dog for us. i guess that is what the dog training course was for, since it was taught by one of those experts. anyway, i suppose now i will spend the time i would have spent playing with fluffems playing video games instead. i remember it was probably about a year ago or something when i ran over a bunny rabbit on front street, right about the same place where fluffems was run over. but it was raining and night-time when i ran over the bunny rabbit. fluffems was run over in broad daylight when the sun was out, and apparently the road was not icy or slippery at all today, and his white fur would have made him stand out against the black road. i guess he just moved too fast, and probably got in front of the pickup truck right before it ran over him. the truck driver stopped and apologized to my dad, and a police car came, and my dad said that none of it was the driver’s fault, and then the police car drove my dad down to the veterinarian, where my dad dropped fluffems off to be cremated. i don’t know when we are supposed to pick up our cremated dog from the veterinarian. we will never really know what breed fluffems was, or when he was born, or who his previous owner was. that is why i was always so intent on being as nice as possible to my dog and bonding with him as much as possible, so that he would be my dog and forget about any previous owner he may have had. i wonder what happened to his previous owner or why he was abandoned. back in late december and early january, fluffems made friends with a dog in florida named kutyush, hungarian for “doggie”. i hope his little fluffy friend in florida remembers him. he also met my niece erica once... i doubt erica will remember that. it was a million times sadder when my previous dog mokka died, mostly because mokka had suffered so much throughout the whole ordeal of dying, and had spent hours crying out in pain. i am glad that fluffems did not have to suffer at all, because nothing upset me more than seeing fluffems suffer. fluffems was my best friend for the less than 2 years that i had him, but i suppose we both have to move on... he is being cremated and i am still alive. what do you think it is like to be cremated if you are a dead dog? do you think dogs have some sort of spirit to them, and if so, what happens to the spirit after the dog dies? personally i just believe fluffems is dead and his spirit has been snuffed out for good, but i would prefer things if they did not work that way. i still cannot believe it. fluffems meant the world to me, and i would do anything to save him, but unfortunately it is too late. all i am left with is my human family and maybe a few human friends... i suppose we humans may be better adapted for survival than cute little doggies. it makes me wonder why i eat meat, when meat is made of animals that were killed for the express purpose of me eating them. i don’t know though... i like eating meat, and my doggie fluffems loved eating meat too, and so did my previous dog mokka. it is hard to imagine the animals i eat in meat having the personality and spirit of someone like fluffems. i know people for the ethical treatment of animals recently tried to rename fish to be called “sea kittens”, but that won’t work on me, since i don’t like cats, and kittens are cats. i am allergic to cats, and cats are evil creatures that act like they are your friends until they suddenly attack you without warning. a dog would never do something like that, because dogs are loyal, honorable creatures that actually care about people, unlike selfish cats who care about nobody but themselves. i don’t even think cats are really domesticated animals; they can live with humans and are not as afraid of humans as most animals, but they are still fairly wild, much more like wild animals than the extremely domesticated species known as dogs. it is hard to imagine dogs being descended from wolves and so closely related to wolves that they can interbreed with them and have half-dog, half-wolf puppies that are also capable of reproduction when they grow up. then again, fluffems did have a bit of a wild viciousness to him, but it was mostly just in a playful way. i have read that dogs are mentally like wolves except they stay in the mental stage of being a puppy for their entire lives, and dogs never become mentally mature. anyway, i hope fluffems comes back to life somehow so i can play with my doggie again. sure, it won’t happen, but hoping for something does not mean there is any likelihood of it happening, now does it? i am somewhat surprised that i have not gone into a panic attack over my dog dying. it is a bit puzzling to me why i am not more upset, and why i seem to be so calm compared to the last time my dog died. what would fluffems do if he saw me sad? he would come try to cheer me up, jumping up on me and licking my face, and then i would play with him and feel better. on thursday night i came home from work and was upset because i was in trouble, and fluffems managed to cheer me up. no other dog could be quite like fluffems, but maybe that is good, because i would hate to see another dog like him running away every chance it gets and trying to get run over by cars until it finally succeeds. everything else about fluffems was great though. i suppose with fluffems i have had so many near misses where he almost got run over by a car on front street and where i was very worked up about it, that when it finally happens as expected, it is kind of hard for me to come up with any reaction at all. when that which is closest to you is suddenly destroyed, what are you supposed to do? what i would like next is a girlfriend, because a girlfriend would be prettier than a dog and would know better than to try to get run over by cars on a busy road, plus girlfriends live much longer than dogs and they can actually speak english and stuff. i am not sure how loving a girlfriend is because i have never had one, but i have wanted one ever since a little before i hit puberty. so obviously years have gone by, but i am a shy person and guys are expected to make the first move; the few times i tried that i was rejected. a pet dog like fluffems or mokka never rejects you, and always gives you lots of attention and affection. i have never met any people like that, although i still hold out hope that maybe people like that actually exist. well ok, i suppose i might know a person like that, but she already has a boyfriend. anyway, people and dogs are very different things, and neither can substitute for the other... one thing they both have in common is that both can be friendly and provide affection, but in many other ways we humans are quite different from doggies. i don’t really think women are that different from men, to be honest, and that is actually the problem, since people are generally rather selfish, uncaring, and short-sighted. why do you think we have so many wars, or why there are so many crooks like bernie madoff? if dogs were in charge, we would probably still have wars, since dogs are territorial and are not always nice to everyone, but there certainly wouldn’t be dogs who behaved like bernie madoff, a guy who betrayed those closest to him and displayed a complete lack of any morality. certainly if cats were in charge, plenty of them would act like bernie madoff, but it would not matter, since cats are independent creatures that do not really have affection or loyalty or anything like that. if fluffems were a cat, there would be no need to memorialize him, since a cat would feel no need to memorialize a human owner who dies, and in fact the cat would eat their owner’s dead body. i am just trying to show fluffems the kind of attention and affection that fluffems showed me every day without fail. fluffems will always be remembered fondly by all of us humans who knew him. and i do not mean to demean cats in any way, but it is hard for me to feel any affection towards a species of animal that likes to viciously attack me without warning after pretending to be nice and causes me very bad allergies. the only thing i like about cats is their cute appearance. dogs have a cute appearance and many, many other good features as well. i am not really mad at the truck driver who ran over fluffems, though, because fluffems darted in front of so many oncoming vehicles after running away, it was bound to happen sooner or later. i just wish there had been some way to train fluffems. i know some dogs are well-behaved to the point where they do not run away and they can be taken on walks without a leash. i cannot imagine how you train a dog to be like that; perhaps some dogs are just born like that. and apparently dogs are not the only species of animal that can be trained; even humans can be trained, if you are willing to believe it! i do not think that training humans actually works though. nobody has ever successfully trained me to behave the way they want. i have too much of an independent spirit and a rebellious nature... kind of like fluffems. i bet if the obamas had adopted fluffems, he would still manage to run away from the white house quite a bit, and the secret service would not be able to catch him. i can imagine them calling in the fbi, swat teams, national guard, navy seals, and cia special ops to try to catch fluffems, and he would still get away. they would try to chase him down with a supersonic fighter jet, but he would run faster than the fighter jet, which would quickly run out of fuel and have to land, while fluffems would keep running. and he would run all the way back to my house, just to say hi, and he would not even be winded. fluffems could have solved our nation’s energy problems, since he had more than enough energy to power our entire electric grid... like the energizer bunny except more energetic. but a tiny 13-pound creature can easily be stopped by a giant truck that weighs 100 times as much, no matter how fast and energetic it is. i hope i never have to suffer the same fate as my friend fluffems... this whole “death” thing. it doesn’t look too promising about them finding a cure for death, but there are still some “futurists” who claim we will reach a point where the average life expectancy will increase by more than a year each year and keep doing that forever, due to advances in medical science fiction or some nonsense like that. it would be nice if whatever religion says that “all dogs go to heaven” turns out to be true... assuming i also end up in heaven with my dog. but i don’t think that any holy books make too much mention of dogs in that context. this probably means that those books are wrong, since the writers of them do not have faith in Dog, whose name has been mistakenly spelled backwards for centuries. on a more serious note, i miss fluffems and i am pretty sad to see him gone for good. there is nothing any of us can do now to bring him back. it is so surreal, since less than 24 hours ago i was playing with fluffems and we were having a good time... he was as happy as i had ever seen any living creature, running around the house and frolicking, completely full of joy. it was pretty much a polar opposite to the last 24 hours of the previous dog mokka’s life, full of pain and suffering. but i cannot think of a bigger shame than having the life of a wonderful creature like fluffems come to an end so prematurely. his life should have been 4 or 5 times as long, since he is estimated to have been about 3 years old when he died. 3 years is barely any time at all, and certainly not enough for a full lifetime. and we had him less than 2 years. our previous dog was one we had for over 13 years, so there is a bit of a difference there. even with the previous dog, i thought that her death had come far too early, since her 14th birthday was just a month away, and i wanted her to come to my college graduation later that year. if a human being dies at age 13 that is thought of as quite young, so it is a shame dogs have to make do with lifespans that are so much shorter. i think dogs deserve better, but who am i, some kind of genetic engineer? there is nothing i can do about it. i was hoping fluffems might last around the same amount of time as mokka, but life isn’t fair. i am just very very glad i did not have to see fluffems get killed or see his dead body. i have never been able to forget the horrors of seeing mokka die (and hearing her die as well). i remember how guilty i felt about every time i had ever been even slightly mean to mokka, and how i vowed to just be nice to any future dogs, something i did very well with fluffems. i just do not think dogs deserve anything bad in life. i suppose people do not either, but sometimes people are mean to you and then you have to be mean to them in response. well maybe you do not always have to respond like that, but it is rather hard to be nice all the time, given all the nasty people you have to put up with sometimes. dogs are simpler creatures, and they are simpler to deal with than people, which is why it is easier to be nice to them. i suppose even animals i don’t like, such as cats, deserve nice long lives full of happiness. but cats certainly would not show you the same appreciation as a dog like fluffems. fluffems was very good at communicating with me, and i understood him very well; i could usually tell what he wanted when he wanted something, whether it was food, attention, or going outside. i think i probably could have saved fluffems’s life if my parents woke me up while he was loose and told me about it. but it is too late for that, we will never know what could have been done to prevent it, and obviously there are steps that could have been done even earlier, like training him better, for instance. it is as much fluffems’s fault as anyone else’s that he got ran over, since he did have quite a mind of his own after all, and he did what he wanted. sure he did not know any better, but many animals do know better than to run out into the street when a car is coming. and i suppose that it could be argued that this is a form of evolution: survival of the fittest as described by charles darwin. i just wish that evolution did not have to single out fluffems as maladapted for survival in his environment, an environment where there are big streets full of cars, certainly not a natural environment. and then i think of all the animals i have eaten as food, and i wonder about it. i am no vegetarian, but i do feel bad for the animals. oh well. i am going to go have dinner and eat some more animals. it is what fluffems would have done.

sometimes reality is funnier than a parody of it

here are kathie lee gifford and hoda kotb on nbc’s today show... watch it, it is very funny, like a self-parody:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

now here is saturday night live on nbc, doing a parody of them, which is not quite as funny as the reality:


and here is an earlier parody that saturday night live did of them back in january:


what is the point i am trying to make here? i think the thing that is being parodied is much funnier than the parody of it. some things are just so ridiculous that trying to make fun of them can never achieve the levels of LULZ that you get from seeing the original. for instance, how can anyone make fun of TIME CUBE? time cube is such a complete joke and example of EPIC FAIL that anyone who attempts to make fun of it is not even remotely as funny as the original time cube itself. many things in this world have reached such levels of absurdity that making jokes about them is a pointless task. we don’t need comedians to tell us jokes anymore, because THE WORLD HAS DEVOLVED to the point where everything is ONE BIG JOKE! comedy is dead, because how can you make a joke about SOMETHING THAT IS ALREADY A COMPLETE JOKE without being LESS FUNNY than what you are making fun of? there is NOTHING left to make fun of. reality is so full of amazingly ridiculous absurdities, and they are so numinously ubiquitous that the lulz they provide are unavoidable except to those among us who lack a sense of humor. but sometimes even THE INTERNET IS SERIOUS BUSINESS, when the INTERNET HATE MACHINE gets out of control due to HACKERS ON STEROIDS.

lolpolitics

apparently now “joe the plumber”, fresh back from being a war correspondent in the gaza strip for pajamas media, is strategizing for congressional republicans. i love it! and lately rush limbaugh and sarah palin have also made some news and further made republicans look silly! even ann coulter is helping them look silly... i thought she had been permabanned from most of the tv shows for being such a nutcase. but the funniest person of all lately is actually a democrat... rod blagojevich. man does that guy ever crack me up. his media interviews lately have been so ridiculous, i love it. i mean, i am glad the doofus got removed from office as governor of illinois.

soon our own new york state governor, david paterson, will be coming to town here. david paterson has been portrayed as a very silly person on saturday night live, of course, but i think the real david paterson is much less silly. i have been seeing the wisdom of his decision to choose former congresswoman kirsten gillibrand to be u.s. senator kirsten gillibrand since i originally posted opposing that appointment. it seems like it was a good choice, now that more information has come out about her and now that i have seen her speak on tv. she is very smart, a lot smarter than one would expect. i saw her at the nomination ceremony, when she answered a question about why she voted against the banking industry bailout in september, and her answer to that question was so brilliant it left me utterly dumbfounded. she sounded like an expert economist, except smarter. she is no placeholder... she will probably be in the senate for years, unless she pursues even higher office. governor david paterson is also very committed to closing the budget gap as his top priority, and he is a good steward of taxpayer dollars with his focus on fiscal responsibility. he has been having lots of public meetings to talk about the state’s fiscal crisis (which he inherited from previous governors) with regular people, and he has answered their questions. soon he will have one of those meetings at a place so close to my house i can walk there in such a small amount of time that i get neither frostbite nor hypothermia. i won’t be there, because it will happen when i am at my job, but maybe my parents could go. i have seen a previous one of these on c-span, so maybe this meeting will also be videotaped by c-span and broadcast on national television. i urge everyone in the binghamton area, especially my parents, to go there and try to get on national tv on c-span asking the governor questions. and don’t ask stupid questions like “what is your favorite color?”. normally that is a good question to ask politicians, just like “boxers or briefs?”, but our governor is blind, so it would be in poor taste. stick to relevant questions, like “can i have some free money in exchange for doing nothing?” i mean seriously, isn’t more money what everyone wants? rich people want lower taxes, poor people want welfare, and the middle class wants lower taxes AND welfare. the rich also want no-bid contracts, the power to have their lobbyists write legislation and be in charge of regulatory agencies, and lots of other corrupt dealings, but forget about the details and focus on the main point: everyone wants more money. the government could just print more money, but we are already doing that. the only reason this hasn’t made our currency worthless through inflation is that economic contraction actually leads to deflation, and the banks have stopped lending out money, making the multiplier on the money supply much less than before. there may be more physically existing money now, but there is less electronic money out in make-believe fantasy land, and that electronic money is just as much a part of the money supply as actual physical money. all the money in your bank account is just make-believe fantasy electronic money that does not physically exist, because banks don’t keep your money locked in a safe, they go out and loan it to other people or invest it in other stuff. lately the banks have been doing a lot less lending, making this multiplier a lot lower, which is why deflation is actually a danger despite the huge amounts of physical paper currency and coins being made by the government to increase the money supply. basically the government is trying to do the exact opposite of what banks do, in order to keep the currency stable. so maybe someone could ask the governor what he plans on doing with wall street. wall street has that name because there used to be a wall there instead of a street. maybe if wall street continues its downward spiral of doom, we can bulldoze it and build a wall there again. why? i am not sure. maybe to keep brain-eating zombies from eating will smith. or maybe that is just the movie “i am legend”, which totally sucked. anyway, i am opposed to the existence of pseudo-public pseudo-private companies/government entities like fannie mae, freddie mac, and the federal reserve for that matter. everything should be either completely public (part of the government) or completely private (like companies and charitable organizations). any entities such as fannie mae, freddie mac, or the federal reserve that are not entirely public or private need to pick a side! we’re at war! public or private? which is it? choose one and stick with it! i think the postal service and amtrak may also suffer from this problem of being partially public and partially private, and they need to pick sides too. as for whether to nationalize or privatize all the bailed-out banks, i think they should return to the private sector, after they pay off the government with interest for the money they borrowed from us taxpayers. our local city government nationalized a hotel a while back after the hotel failed to pay property taxes and its owners went bankrupt, and now the city is having a hard time selling the hotel. government should not be in the hotel management business. that is all i am saying here. oh, and my dog is cute and fuzzy and very nice. i love my dog! never forget that... how awesome my dog is. he is so awesome, he got an ear infection a few weeks ago, and then i figured out he had an ear infection and took him to the vet along with my dad, and then my dad and i used medicine the vet gave us to cure the ear infection, which is gone now. now my dog is as healthy as when we first got the mangy mutt from the dog pound, when he was still a puppy. he runs around like crazy and tears stuff to shreds with his teeth, and jumps up on people and licks them on the face. he does have a bit of a problem with barking indoors sometimes now. it is sometimes difficult to tell why he is barking. he is a very strange beast, and one of the most vicious i have ever encountered. but he loves me more than anything and i really appreciate his support and loyalty.